Every now and then Penguin fire out a burst of Essentials, a series that usually consists of books from the Modern Classics line, rebranded as smaller paperbacks with eye-catching covers. The thinking is that these will appeal to the sort of people who would not pick up a classic. Who are these mad people? Can we give them a good pummeling?

After a long period of quiet, a new batch of 10 have just been released, with cover designs by a range of contemporary artists. Click for bigger versions.

Thursday, 7 August 2014

Another competitor for the late lamented Tutis: The Library of Alexandria, whose reassuring web presence consists of a Facebook page full of unsolicited legal advice. Unlike Tutis, who stole their wildly inappropriate cover images from anywhere, The Library of Alexandria mostly stick to paintings in the public domain. Fortunately for our purposes, they are choosing the images based on no sane basis.

Here's their unique approach to P. G. Wodehouse...

Mark Twain...

F. Scott Fitzgerald...

The hidden side of Antarctica...

And their strange takes on some other literary classics (the unconventional cropping is their own work)...